Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: digital public history, museums, popular collecting practices, material culture, memory and memorialization, cultural history, postal history, history of the federal government

About Me: Sheila A. Brennan is formerly the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Research Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Brennan is an experienced public historian, who began her career working in federal history museums. Since 2005, she has developed and managed 30+ digital humanities projects, including the award-winning Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and Histories of the National Mall. She writes and presents on topics in digital history, collecting practices, postal history, and how museums use digital technologies. She is publishing an open access digital monograph, Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post this summer by the University of Michigan Press. Brennan has a PhD in American and digital history from Mason, as well as an MA from the University of Notre Dame and BA from Bates College, both in American Studies.

Recent Publications

Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018) Open access and print versions
The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook, Advisory Board Member and author (American Association for State and Local History & National Council on Public History, forthcoming)
Data Loss and Recovery in the Age of Paper,” Parameters, Social Science Research Council, June 7, 2017, http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/06/data-loss-and-recovery-in-the-age-of-paper/
“A Case for Digital Collections,”Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 12, 4 (Fall 2016).
“Public, First,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83.
“Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project,” white paper and guide, co-author Sharon Leon, et al, (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, October 2015), http://mallhistory.org/Guide/

“Making Room by Letting Go: A Look at the Ephemerality of Collections,” invited blog post, Preservation Nation, National Preservation Leadership Forum blog, National Trust for Historic Preservation, August 12, 2014 http://blog.preservationleadershipforum.org/2014/08/12/collections-making-room-by-letting-go/.